i have an idea as to how such a game can be made practical to start off with. i would like to post it here first before going to devnet to see how everyone thinks of it. also, i have a general idea of how i think it might all work, but things are coming to me as i write them down, so the structure of the post is a little chaotic, my appologies in advanced.
here goes:
at the start, everyone gets to choose a race, so everyone has the option to starts off as an employee of a government, and if the choose that career path, is assigned to a station (or a carrier in the case of fighter pilots, if you are lucky
) at random. as a government employee, you are given two ships - a freighter and a fighter and assigned a home base.
as a government employee, you will be given a basic salary and given missions that must be completed in a certain time frame. the missions would be designed so that you get to explore the space of that race as you do your job, and you would also get a mix ot trade and combat. but you dont get to go 'abroad' until you have reached a certain rank, and even then its only to boarderline systems. as a government employee, there will also be strick rules that must be followed (ie no piracy, no trading with hostile races, no selling of ship equipment and you might also have players from some other races set as hostile as default etc), or you face fines or even expeltion if you offend too often.
between missions you can make a little on the side through independent trading with your own money. and maybe also do a little exploring. but you can be given a mission at any time (or, alternatively, you are given a pre-set holiday to do what you like, and you get to keep the government ship, provided you bring it back in one piece that is), and there will be a time limit so that has to be taken into account (the time limit is calculated based on your ship speed and the distance to homebase + a little spare time so you wont get impossible missions).
if your ship gets blown up, you are auto-ejected (and dont appear like Khaak or xenon pilots when they eject so as not to get killed by PSGs or bad piloting) and respaw at your homebase and gets supplied with a new ship.
to balance things out, you would loose money from your personal account, any extra equipment and upgrades you made to the ship and also take a hit to your trade and combat rank depending on what role you were playing at the time (ie if you got killed while on a trade run, your trade rank will take a bigger hit then your combat rank, and vise versa). maybe if you die too often, you get a downgraded ship (slower/ no turret/ less cargo bay etc).
alternatively, you can have spacesuits, but also a volentary ejection option and you only return to your homebase after a short while in space. the incentive is that you dont loose your own money (as you would have time to gather everything up before you eject
), and maybe also take a smaller hit on the rankings.
this means that people are encoraged to eject as opposed to just sit in a hopeless situation and get killed. ie making combat and piracy more attractive. this should tempt more people to take up piracy and also give the government fighterboys something to do.
but if you kill a spacesuit, there will be a record of that so that pilots can check out the stats of their attackers before deciding whether or not to eject. this means that pirates would have an incentive to not kill spacesuits, which might make things interesting in combat.
if your spacesuit is destroyed before you are returned to your station, you just loose the same credits and rankings as if you never ejected at all.
with spacesuits, there also comes the option of being scooped up and sold as slaves option.
again, there would be a record of such activity AND the for both, the victim pilot would get a special log that lists all the people that have done this to him/her, and any property that the offender owns is marks in flashing red (as opposed to just red for any hostile) automatically unless the victim deselects that specific offender or the option as a whole.
if you havent guessed it already, if you are going to play nasty, you better watch your back. but them this might appeal to many.
the government option is safe and restrictive, with promotional options so players that persist get the reward of more pay and better and more ships as they progress through the ranks and can end up as station/station chain/ sector managers or battleship commanders (all stations and cap ships will start off AI controled and also be AI controled when the player given command of it is not online, potental problem if the said station/ship gets destroyed when the player assigned to it is not around at the time
). high-ranking government employees would also get preferable treating in applying for construction licences (will go into detail on this later).
however, there will also be the independent option.
i have already meantioned the piracy option. pirate bases would be set up in the pirate sectors where government fighters and warships are not allowed to enter (could just write it in as sectors that are hotly disputed between races and that any offical military incution would be seen as an act of war - like a future demiliterised zone).
to make things interesting, at the start of the game a lottery system would send messages to players at random inviting them to join a pirate base/clan. these lucky few would get a pirate base assigned and get new ships if they die...basically the same treatment as government employees minus the pay. but they would be afforded much more freedom, with fewer complusery missions, and of course, they get to just blow things up for fun.
that should build up a core of pirates to start off with, and as more players progress in their own games, they can choose to join the pirates when they are good enough - there would be a modestly high combat rank requirement for players to be offered the chance to become a pirate.
the incentive for joining a pirate clan is so they also enjoy free replacement ships of the same class (replacement ships are pirate patern ships like orinocos and baymons instead of the ship the player had before) when they die, and also the player themselves are not identified as a pirate - when someone not a member of that pirate clan brings up the ship info, they only get the rankings and clan name, not the pilot name. meaning the pilot is not marked out and has the option of returning to civilian life later on if he so wishes or even running two lives at the same time. joining a clan also means that you are unlikely to be attacked by fellow clan members, as that will carry with it penalties for the attacker. but the pilots will have to give the pirate base/clan a cut of their profits as protection money.
to make sure people are given a chance to join a pirate clan instead of being shot to pieces before they get anywhere near a pirate base, all pilots with the sufficient ranking would be offered the chance to become a pirate when they enter a pirate sector for the first time. after that, a player need to get withing comms range and hail the base to join.
apart from the pirating option, there will also be the freelancer trader and mercinary options.
for these options, you start off with two fairly good ships (compared to the government employees) and a reasonable amount of money, and you can do what you want.
there will be of course BBS missions (btw, individual players would be able to offer BBS missions as well, with auto-filtering sifting out the missions with higher ranking requirements then what a player is at, as to not have unmanageble amounts of BBS missions on the boards, a player would also have the option of auto-filtering out missions with too small a reward) to take, and a player can do independent trading, and can also offer up sector information for sale to make money. the quality of the data would be auto assessed and auto-priced so a sector map with all the asteriods scanned will be worth alot more then a map with only a few roids scanned etc (there would also be a limit as to how many time the info for a certain sector can be sold by a person, so someone cant make a rediculous amount of money from just selling maps, also, the limit is on the sector and not the info, so you cant re-offer the map for sale after scanning one more asteroid).
being a free-lancer also means that you can enter the pirate sectors and trade between hostile races, and can buy low and sell high to make alot of money by trading between hostile races. but there is also a much greater risk of doing so, so a trader might want to offer a BBS mission to hire some escorts (of course, the whole pricing scheme would need to be drastically re-tuned to make all this viable, purhaps with the introduction of high-end comsumer products that are bought by various trading stations whatever the quantity at a fixed prices based on a risk+distance scale).
the balancer would be that if you loose your ship, you loose it for good. meaning that you would either have to buy insurance at high game play hour rates (ie, xxxx credits for every game hour) which become more expansive as you loose more ships, or you risk being stranded on the nearest station after you die, and have to call in your other ship (if you still had it), or having to buy a ride to the nearest shipyard to buy a new or used ship.
- side note, when someone sells a ship at a shipyard, it is sold on a bidding basis. the player selling the ship can place a minimum price and just walk away. people can bid for as long as they can be bothered, and the seller gets his money minus a small handling charge sent to his accounts when the ship is sold after an uncontested bid has been made. or he will get a message telling him no-one has met the minimum sell price after a set period of time.
- side note, equipment docks should have unlimited amounts of equipment on sale, but individual players have a quota on the number of each time they can buy in a certain period. this opens up another possible earner as an arms dealer - buying up weapons and equipment as often as you are allowed and offering to sell them in bulk at inflated prices.
anyways, the point being that the player BBS means that there should be an infinate number and type of missions on offer to players, and that is the most important feature i had in mind.
freelancers would also have the option of starting or joining private corperations after a while.
to start a corperation, one only needs a station. you can either trade by yourself, or hire other freelancers with ships to work for you either on a perminant basis, or on one-off BBS missions, or you can buy ships have have them autotrade.
to give the freelancers a chance, i propose a few changes to the current system.
first off, if you hire someone and their ship gets destroyed, they are given a new one free of charge to either of you, so all that is lost is the contents of the ship.
if you bought corporate insureance, that would be replaced as well. if you didnt, you can take it out of the pay of the person who lost the ship, or you can sack him or take equipment from his ship as compansation etc. there will be a number pre-set options a factory owner can select when hiring, and what has been selected would be listed in the job description.
setting up in the heart of a race's territory is the safest option, but you need a licence to set up a station in the territory of any race (and there will be a limited number of licences as to not overload certain sectors, and each person will be given a cap as to the number of licences he can hold in each sector, again, crafty people would realise that there is money to be made in buying and re-selling developing licences). there will be a sliding scale licencing price policy meaning the safer a sector, the more expansive the licence to operate there will be.
setting up in the outer sectors would be cheaper and have more potential for higher profits, but with all the player controled pirate ships around, dont expect AI traders to last long on their own out there. so fighter escorts might need to be hired. with so many dangers a player may wish to buy or hire some hydras or osprays and have 'stops' in the safer sectors where transports can meet up with the M6s and transport cargo to and from the warships to get it across dangerous sectors (see a use for the hydra at last!
).
- side note. satilites, video enhancement goggles, jumpdrives, 25MW and 125MW sheilds, silkworm and hornet missiles, PPCs, mass drivers, PSGs, Ion-Ds, lasertowers, quash mines, freight scanners etc would be listed as restricted equipment by governments and not traded freely so as to make gameplay more complex instead of just everyone Ion-Ding/ PSGing/ mass drivering ( 
) horneting each other and seeing who pulled the trigger first.
limited numbers of these items would hidden in remote places at the start, and made extra special by being indestructable (missiles, mines, lasertowers, satillites etc will be indestructable only to the point when it is deployed, after that it becomes normal). so if a ship carrying one or more of such items is destroyed, the said equipment would remain and can be picked up (oh, i can just imagine the mass murder that would break out if a ship exploded in a crowded system to leave some of these items with everyone wanting them 
).
apart from these extra special equipment, a small number of the highest ranking government and pirate employees would be issued with some of the listed items as a reward for long (after reaching a certain rank) and/or distinguished service (like making five kills in one mission or something like that). issued special equipment can be destroyed with the ship (purhaps not always, with a 25% chance that some will survive).
also, shipments of such items would be made infrequently and heavily protected by the highest ranking government fighters and maybe even corvettes in the sector where the transport carrying the items is to spawn in.
the start and end of the journey would be 'leaked' to the pirates some time in advanced, and a small number of BBS notices would be posted at random near the rought giving the same info for a high fee.
the items would not be destroyed when the tranport carrying it is destroyed, but after that the items become just as easily destroyed as normally in the game.
for freelance mercs, there would be the run of the mill assassiation missions (but with much smaller pay); escrot missions, and government enlistment missions for major wars (skirmishes really) and maybe even station killing missions etc.
maybe if they throw in some big ticket missions like wars, xenon/khaak raids and natural spacial phanomion like meteor showers, black holes etc that destroys random stations once in a while, and/or have new sectors become accessable as the online community grows, we might have a pretty good and manageable game.
well, its getting late, and thats about all i have right now.
so what do you guys think?
is it doable? would you like to play such a game if it was made? any changes or expantions you would like to make on any of the points i made?
, I am but the sum of my experiences… and today I am more than I was yesterday. 
but hopefully by the time this kind of game is made:
)